


Message in a Time Capsule

by SMJB



Series: Library of the Miskatonic University [2]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:27:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24674602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: An anonymous student at Miskatonic University is asked to be of assistance to archeologists from the future. They have some thoughts about it.
Series: Library of the Miskatonic University [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1782181
Kudos: 3





	Message in a Time Capsule

_From a journal included in a time capsule coordinated by Professor Sam Flint, author anonymous._

So professor Flint told the class to go out into the streets of Arkham and interview people for this time capsule project--after all, it’s something Flint always wanted as an archeologist, to know what the common people of Greece or Samarkand or wherever thought of themselves, their empires, their rulers, their day-to-day lives and their worlds. I will not be doing that.

There are those who would take comfort in knowing that the end of our civilization more closely resembles the fall of Rome than that of the Indus River Valley civilization, in that those on our fringes will rise like a phoenix from our ashes, embracing the best of what we were while rejecting the worst. To me, what it means is that myself, my children, or my grandchildren will die screaming in whatever nuclear holocaust or climate collapse or whatever is destined to destroy us, and all of your archeologists who braved the hounds of Tindalos to come voyeristically spy on us will not lift a finger to help. You would sacrifice the lives of everyone I know and love on the pyre of ensuring that history goes the way it “should,” yet I’m supposed to be doing YOU a favor?

Perhaps I should not take it personally. But the fact that it’s impersonal just makes it worse! If you would condemn me to die--which you do, by inaction--at least have the decency to hate me! And frankly, why SHOULD it make it better? I’m just as dead either way. If I somehow found a way to defy fate, you wouldn’t spend a single resource less to save your timeline than if it were personal.

Even knowing that objectively speaking we are guilty of the same sin doesn’t make it better. I know that we have access to the Book of Eibon ourselves, and that our own temporal explorers aren’t inoculating pre-contact Native Americans against European diseases. To be honest, I may drop out of Miskatonic University after this--or at the VERY least, switch majors.

So what shall I do instead of talking about the life of some random Arkhamite? How about waste your time as much as mine by lecturing you on a topic you no doubt understand better than I do? If I must sit here and think about the inevitable end of my civilization as I write this, you must sit there and think about the inevitable end of yours as you read it.

I don’t have a time traveler telling me that you will die; what I have is the technically much stronger evidence (after all, an eyewitness may lie) of the pattern in history and prehistory. I also have the evidence of looking up into the sky at night.

There is in my time, and no doubt will be in yours, the fantasy of building habitats in space. We can design with modern technological constraints great big ones that spin and that from within, looking up at an artificial sky, you would never know you weren’t on a planet; no doubt in your time you have fewer constraints and can thus imagine even greater artificial worlds. Had we the economic will, we could make enough of these to engulf the sun in a Dyson swarm in time. We know that in theory we can mine the sun itself for materials if we run out of planets and moons to cannibalize, and we know we can repeat this process around other stars.

Now look at the night sky. Do you see those dark patches in the galaxy, where growing Dyson volumes of civilizations ravenously devour the galaxy for raw materials? Neither do I. We see the naked stars--and why is that? It’s not like we’re alone in the universe--spacefaring races have flitted between the stars for at least four billion years that we know of, and yet no one else has had the idea? Of course not; there’s NO WAY we’re the first to have thought of it. The reason there are no Kardashev-II civilizations out there is that the gods do not permit it. Do we not have enough examples of fallen civilizations on this planet to prove it?

The Earth has given rise to a dozen intelligent clades and has been colonized by hundreds more. We know this; we’ve found their cities and their bodies and their books, and the most daring among us have used one method of necromancy or another to speak to eyewitnesses. And the thing is, when we started to realize just how many different alien species have colonized this planet over the hundred of millions of years, a problem became apparent. (Do you already know where this is going? Too bad; I’m going to say it anyway, and you are going to sit there and read it for you daren’t miss out on any of the “historical value” of my writing.)

See, when Europeans went out and colonized the world, we didn’t go alone. We brought cows and sheep and chickens and horses and rats and cats and rabbits and dandelions and wheat and hogs and zebra barnacles and all sorts of other biota, intentional and not. But the various invaders this planet has had seemed to have been oddly courteous in that respect; our world is, in terms of biomass, overwhelmingly dominated by the descendants of LUCA. Could these lifeforms really be so maladapted to the Earth that nothing would survive once it was no longer being carefully tended to by intelligent minds? Seems like Earth would be a poor choice of home, then. Where are the wave after wave of invasive species we would expect to see from these waves of colonization?

Well, someone did some outside the box thinking and realized that we are probably not unique in being invaded as many times as we have been. If all the habitable worlds of the galaxy have had histories similar to Earth’s for as long as the Earth has, then the worlds of the galaxy aren’t isolated experiments in life--they are islands in a galactic archipelago with frequent rafting events. Why don’t we see invasive species? We do; we just can’t tell them apart from the natives. Everything seems to fit into the same tree of life because it does--the tree of life that dominates all habitable worlds in the galaxy. Panspermia-on-steroids, detractors called the idea until the name stuck.

Imagine that; civilizations rise and mix the biota of worlds with such frequency that we can reasonably suspect that the life around Alpha Centauri isn’t much stranger than the life in Australia, and yet are so swift to fall that to an observer from Andromeda there’s no evidence that intelligent life has ever arisin in the Milky Way at all. Nor is it apparent to us that life exists there; all we see is dead space--fitting, in a universe that’s a graveyard of civilizations.

So I suppose this is all I have to say to you: enjoy your post-scarcity civilization and world peace while it lasts, people of the future--and when the gods and monsters decide that you’ve gotten too big for your britches, do the species proud and face the end on your feet, not on your knees.

**Author's Note:**

> It may seem like a bold choice, to commit myself to finding ways to shoehorn all of the Mythos' monsters into known clades, but the simple fact of the matter is that you **should** get invasive species out the ass if the Earth is being colonized every million years or so. This creates a problem since I want this world to be, you know, recognizable. And so, a rather simple and elegant if limiting solution. Also this lets me set some of the ground work for K'n-yan, so there's that.
> 
> Also I held off on publishing this for a while because I didn't want to go from dark to dark--LotMU is a universe in which there are a lot of philosophically disturbing concepts, but like, the lives of everyday people there are no more dystopian than in our world (okay, bad example, but still). But it turns out that the next thing I intended to publish relies heavily on concepts laid out here.


End file.
